For Johnathan Winthrop the sunset on the evening of February 17th, 2031 might have been the most beautiful that he had ever seen. Maybe it was something about the way that the light scattered red through the smoke of distant wildfires, carried out to the coast by the Santa Ana winds. Or maybe it was the long reflection that it cast over the breakers, unbroken by the high veil of cirrostratus that painted the ceiling of the world a pale blue, transitioning to milky pink on the threshold between light and dark. Maybe it was the sea birds, singing their honking song on the billowing wind and riding the air currents out over the Pacific. Maybe it was some combination of all of those things.
Or maybe it was the simple fact that Dr. Winthrop knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this sunset would be his last.
To be sure, it was set to be the last sunset that 10% of the population would ever see, but those odds really weren't so terrible. For the aging trauma surgeon, the chance that he would be selected to die in the morning wasn't why he'd stolen (really just "walked out of the office with"; no one had noticed because no one cared) a high-dose vial of morphine sulphate and a set of syringes for intravenous injection. The problem was that humanity had decided to bend the knee once, to submit to a proper, Latin-style decimation in order to spare itself annihilation, and put the culling of the entire world's population to a lottery as best it could, and he recognized that the implications of that were more frightening than they seemed to many of his neighbors.
Dr. Winthrop watched the sea foam roll up the incline of muddy sand less than three yards from where he sat cross-legged on a blue and white-striped beach blanket, then retreat into the sea, submitting to laws of gravity and motion. Further out, the breakers rolled in vast tubes of water and salt spray four or five feet high. The same height as his 12-year old granddaughter Hattie, whose odds were the same as his of dying on a gurney in the goddamn Staples Center. Maybe he should stay alive for her, in case she wasn't chosen but both her parents were?
The thought lingered for a moment, then another image crossed his mind, at least as vivid but much more frightening. Hattie, three years earlier, pouring water from a garden hose into a mound of ants. Hattie, in her green and white floral sundress giggling as she destroyed what might as well have been an empire. Hattie, explaining herself in a voice that sounded so like the one that had spoken from the inside of his skull three weeks before. Spoken without words, but with an intent clearer than words could ever convey.
There was no doubt in Dr. Winthrop's mind that the thing was a child, or something as similar to a child as it was ever possible for a god to be. Its reasoning had been childish, just like Hattie's. Maybe the ants would have eaten a baby bird in its shell, and maybe humanity would destroy its environment, but there was something less purposeful behind the inefficient means taken to accomplish that purported goal. Behind the voice that spoke without words, and revealed so much of its interior thought processes throught that melding of minds. It was a sort of sadism that motivated it, the kind that only a child could possess. A giggling, gleeful malice, full of cruelty but with no real hatred, directed to something so beneath it that the organisms drowning in the flowing stream barely seemed alive.
If it could make humanity do this, what more could it force upon the world? For a child of that age, Dr. Winthrop knew, all was caprice. Would the three greatest nuclear powers enforce a proclamation that everyone must wear pink on Fridays, or yodel a song in an alien language about having Fart Breath? What about an order to torture the next 10% to death on live television?
No, Hattie would have to survive as best she could in this new world, were she unfortunate enough to be in the 90% of losers in this strange new lottery. Dr. Winthrop stood up, looking out at the first few stars to appear in the darkling sky, and he hoped against hope that there was no other, greater God to punish him for leaving her alone with this thing that saw her more as a toy than a playmate.
A cold breeze blew out to sea. Sirius twinkled overhead in the firmament. Somewhere across the endless gulf, an ancient, dull, and cold star bathed one tidally-locked hemisphere of a steaming world of islands and endless sea in rosy light, roiling the sea to unthinkable tempests on the Western pole and freezing it to ice at the Eastern. Somewhere in Dr. Winthrop's mind, his decision became finalized.
As the world faded into the blue shades of civil twilight, Dr. Winthrop walked up the playa, toward his parked Honda and away from the world of the living and the damned.